Dancing For Your Whole Life: Yogic Advice from the Vijnanabhairava Tantra

Wander or dance to exhaustion in utter spontaneity. Then, suddenly, drop to the ground and in this fall be total. There absolute essence is revealed.

~ Vijnanabhairava Tantra, verse 111

Each of has the desire (yes?) to become ~ with each breath we take, with each step of our lives ~ more fully alive And yet there is the paradox that each breath we take, each step of our lives, brings us one step, one breath closer to our death. So how do we work with this? Is there a solution to this paradox?

The traditions of Buddhism as well as Kashmir Shaivism see (the appearance of) this life of ours as training-ground for (the appearance of) that moment of our death. They resolve the paradox through the understanding that only by training ~ in every moment ~ in the art of being fully alive, fully present here and now, in this moment, in this moment, in this moment ~ only through a practice such as this are we able then to be fully present (fully alive!) at the moment of our death.

The quotation above, from the Vijnanabhairava Tantra (a text written by the Shaivite school of Kashmir around the first century A.D.), points to such a resolution. Lets take a closer look

Wander or dance to exhaustion in utter spontaneity. Have you ever danced, or performed any other activity, so completely, with such total abandon, such love and absorption, that the point of exhaustion (what distance runners call the wall) opens into a whole new realm of experience, puts you in touch with a whole new flow of energy/inspiration? Its the moment when years of training (our accumulated expertise) is allowed to open, to fall away into a mindless spontaneity when movement becomes both divinely precise and effortless (Michael Jordan, Baryshnikov, & Jet Li come to mind here) when I am no longer doing anything, yet all things are still manifesting, radiantly, perfectly. In the language of Taoism this state of effortless doing is called Wu Wei.

Then, suddenly, drop to the ground and in this fall be total. Have you ever gone out on a warm summer night, laid on your back on a grassy hillside, and let your mind & heart & vision travel out into the starry sky, with its countless galaxies? When we surrender, we surrender completely no holding back. We let the whole thing dissolve. We die into the present moment. In the language of Tibetan Buddhism, this is called the Completion Stage.

There absolute essence is revealed. What if the essence of life and the essence of death were one and the same? What if both our wandering and our dancing were expressions of that one essence, and equally wise? What if we could touch ~ with each breath, each step, each of our awakened daily activities ~ the sweetness & power that is this essence?

And now, please feel free . to Dance!

Elizabeth Reninger holds a Masters degree in Chinese medicine, is a published poet, and has been exploring yoga - in its Taoist, Buddhist & Hindu varieties ~ for more than twenty years. Her teachers include Richard Freeman and Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. To read more of her yoga-related essays, please visit her website: http://www.writingup.com/blog/elizabeth_reninger

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Virtual Private Networks - The Basics

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can extend a local area network (LAN) over the Internet to remote networks and remote client machines. A VPN uses the Internet to route LAN traffic from one location to another by encapsulating the data inside encrypted IP packets. The encrypted packets are unreadable by intermediary Internet devices and can contain any kind of network communications - such as file and printer sharing, e-mail, remote procedure calls, and database access.

VPNs can be setup using server computers, firewalls or routers. Client access to the VPN can be made using client-side VPN software or by connecting to an ISP that supports the VPN protocol.

VPNs solve the problem of accessing private servers over the Internet through a combination of IP encapsulation, cryptographic authentication and data payload encryption.

IP Encapsulation
IP encapsulation provides a way to protect the data while in transit between the remote client and the private LAN. Computers outside the VPN should not be able to snoop on the traffic exchanged between the remote client and private server or be able to insert their own data into the communication stream. This is accomplished by creating what people refer to as a private and protected "tunnel" through the public Internet. When an IP packet contains another IP packet this is called IP encapsulation, and it provides a mechanism to refer to a host within a private network when a direct network connection may not exist. When this is combined with data encryption then we've effectively created our virtual tunnel.

Cryptographic Authentication
Cryptographic Authentication is used to securely validate the identity of the remote client so that the private LAN can determine what level of security should be applied to that user. VPNs use the authentication process to determine whether or not a remote user can participate in the encrypted tunnel, and for exchanging the public key that will subsequently be used for data encryption.

data Payload encryption
Data Payload encryption uses a public key to encrypt the data field of the IP encapsulated packet. That is, data payload encryption is exactly like normal IP except that the data has been encrypted. It does not encrypt the header information, so details of the private network can be gleaned by analyzing the header information.

Advantages and Disadvantages
Compared to wide Area Networks (WANs), VPNs offer some advantages but, also, present some disadvantages.

 Advantages - cheaper than WANs - easier to setup than WANs Disadvantages - slower than WANs - less reliable than WANs - less secure than isolated WANs 

Example
Although there are a number of ways to configure a VPN here is an example of one scenario that is fairly common -- an employee wishes to work from home and exchange data between their home machine and a private web server on the corporate network. There are two important processes here -- the process of negotiating and building a VPN session, and the process of protecting and handling the data within an existing VPN connection. Here I'll briefly describe the latter and leave the former as a potential topic for a future article.

Suppose we have the following:
(a) a VPN client with a public IP address of 66.123.77.196 and a private IP address of 192.168.0.202 (provided by the corporation's dhcp server).
(b) a VPN server on the corporate network with two interfaces -- a public interface to the Internet that uses 168.156.192.75 and an interface to the private network with an IP of 192.168.0.101
(c) a web server on the corporate network with an IP address of 192.168.0.102

Prior to creating a VPN session the client host has one interface and a connection to the Internet through an ISP. The client machine can communicate with any host on the Internet but can not access the web server on the private network 192.168.0.X. After the VPN session has been created then the client host has 2 interfaces -- the original interface to the Internet and a new VPN interface. The new VPN interface becomes the default gateway -- that is, all packets will initially travel through the new interface. However, the VPN interface is not a physical network card -- it doesn't physically connect to anything. The VPN interface is used to encrypt and encapsulate packets that are subsequently sent as the payload of a new, outer packet. It is the outer packet that is sent out over the Internet (using the original interface) to the corporate VPN server.

The inner packet will use the client's private IP of 192.168.0.202 as the source IP address and the web server's private IP of 192.168.0.102 as the destination address. The VPN client encrypts the data field of the inner packet and this inner packet then becomes the payload of an outer packet. The outer packet uses the client's public IP of 66.123.77.196 as the source IP address and the public interface of the VPN server (168.156.192.75) as the destination IP. The IP encapsulated packet is then sent to the ISP and out over the Internet.

When the IP encapsulated packet reaches the VPN server at the edge of the private network it will unwrap the inner packet and decrypt its data field. Since the VPN server also has an interface to the private network it will then be able to forward the inner packet to the destination web server. When data is sent from the web server back to the client then the process is reversed -- that is, the VPN server handles the encryption/encapsulation and the VPN client is responsible for unwrapping/decoding.

Steve Leytus is a senior software engineer and develops applications for NutsAboutNets.com. For more information about low cost, PC-based diagnostic tools for installing, optimizing and trouble-shooting 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless networks please visit http://www.NutsAboutNets.com

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